the seo metagame

level up your seo with video game tactics

I recently watched Mark Williams-Cook’s talk, Improve your SEO with video games and exploits, at brightonSEO 2025.

The talk opens with him explaining how, when he first played an online multiplayer game, he found himself losing constantly - despite using the same tactics that had served him well in the single player mode.

In the unshackled multiplayer games, players were uncovering and exploiting every possible advantage they could - so anyone trying to play conventionally found themselves woefully caught off guard.

These other players weren’t cheating per se, nor was it as straightforward as them simply breaking the rules - instead they were using what the game allowed in unexpected ways, exploiting mechanics in ways that simply hadn’t been accounted for.

what’s this got to do with seo?

Mark likens this to learning SEO in theory vs how it operates in the real world. When you initially start diving into SEO, you’ll learn about the usual stuff: internal linking, heading hierarchy, keywords and you feel prepared to start.

But even after you’ve done everything our Google overlords ask, you can still find yourself buried in the SERPs beneath your competitors. Sometimes that is simply because they are doing the basics better than you: more useful content, a cleaner site, links they have genuinely earned. But sometimes it is something else. Whatever they are doing is not necessarily against the rules, yet it is not written anywhere in the instructions either.

It’s at this point we introduce the concept of the meta (or metagame) in gaming, often referred to as ‘a game beyond the game’. In competitive games, this usually means finding the optimal way to win. This might involve selecting a particular character, choosing certain items, or adopting a proven, dominant style of gameplay.

In SEO, the meta is whatever is quietly working right now that isn’t in Google’s official playbook: the thing your competitors are using to leapfrog you that isn’t written down anywhere. It lives in grey-hat territory, the same place Mark’s multiplayer exploiters did, not the sanctioned white-hat basics and not the outright black-hat stuff Google bans, but the gap in between, using what Google allows in ways it would rather you didn’t. The catch is that the gap never stays open. Today’s clever grey-hat edge is tomorrow’s penalised black-hat tactic, the moment a core update decides it has seen enough.

nerf, adapt, repeat

The game creators typically make adjustments to rebalance the game in response to this dominance. They often weaken the potency (‘nerf’) of certain items, abilities or characters. Alternatively, with so many players using the same strategy, the community may unearth a new meta designed to counter the current one (like a game of rock, paper, scissors).

The meta doesn’t ever go away in either case; it simply has to change again and again. Mark likened this phenomenon to when SEO practitioners find something that works for manipulating Google’s algorithm. If an advantage exists in SEO, people will certainly exploit it to its fullest.

Google will eventually correct this. It regularly rolls out core updates to its algorithm. These updates not only reduce or ‘nerf’ the effectiveness of these exploits but often penalise the worst offenders.

the only winning move

Here is where the metaphor stops being a neat party trick and earns its keep. If SEO is a metagame and Google is the Dungeon Master, one who can rewrite the rulebook mid-match whenever it likes, then piling into the current meta is the single move guaranteed to eventually backfire. The exploit everyone is crowding onto is, by definition, the biggest target on the board, and it is the first thing the next core update comes for.

So the winning move is not to find the meta. It is to play what survives the patch. And here Mark’s own experience is the giveaway. He once built a Dungeons and Dragons site with content so good that strangers emailed to thank him, watched the Helpful Content Update wipe out almost all of its traffic, then pasted the very same words onto LinkedIn and ranked number one within seventy-two hours. Same content, different vessel. The lesson is not that content does not matter, it is that content is the entry ticket, not the moat.

What actually survives a patch is the stuff Google cannot easily fake on your behalf: a real brand, genuine demand from people who seek you out by name, a site people choose on purpose. Mark did not land on this by guesswork, either. A good chunk of his talk is about the paper trail SEOs can actually read to verify what works rather than trusting the theory of the week: patents, the DOJ antitrust documents, and a decade of leaks, plus an exploit his own team uncovered that surfaced a hidden ‘site quality’ score, essentially a measure of how often people search for a site by name and then deliberately choose it. Those are the signals Google leans on precisely because they are the hardest to game. You cannot exploit your way to people actually wanting you. That is not a loophole Google needs to close, because it is the very thing it is trying to measure.

That is not to say ignore the meta. Knowing the current exploit is worth it, if only to spot when a rival’s sudden jump is built on sand the next update will wash away. But if you want to still be ranking this time next year, do not bet the house on a tactic whose only real value is that Google has not got around to nerfing it yet. As Lily Ray puts it, “it works, until it doesn’t.”

Improve your SEO with video games and exploits - Mark Williams-Cook - brightonSEO April 2025

Watch on YouTube →